In Defense of Hooting

This is a reaction to Taibbi’s recent post about In Defense of Looting by Vicky Osterweil.

I like a lot of Matt Taibbi’s work, but I really wish we'd stop talking about riots and looting as if they're discrete processes anyone has direct control over.

What they’re really like is an anaphylactic reaction to ever-increasing levels of inequality and swaths of the population being stuck with paramilitary occupation of their boxed-out communities for generations. You don’t get to choose whether or not your airways swell shut after you’ve eaten that bag of cashews. The President of Antifa can't just do a Tictok telling the rioters they need to dial it down or else “the suburbanites are gonna start backing fascism!”

You might think looting doesn't do anything to promote police reform, or that the idea of it as a crude form of redistribution is gauche excuse-making, but so what? That's as much a hooting-from-the-safety-of-the-peanut gallery reaction as you're accusing Osterweil of. It doesn't feel like productive politics because it's not one. It's a paroxysm of collective rage. Rather than moan about how counterproductive and bad it all looks, why not reflect on what could've possibly brought us to this point?